Francesco

A band with no name, a name with no band, and a life reflection

Photo by Josh Sorenson on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

At sixteen, I played in a band. We sucked. I can’t even remember our name. Maybe I removed it. 

But I do remember Francesco. 

Francesco lived far from our rehearsal place. It’d take him an hour to drive in from his small village in nowhere land, if it wasn’t raining. On rainy days, driving up and down those rough, curvy countryside roads stretched the time to destination to one and a half hours, sometimes two. He was a couple of years my senior. The day we first met, he showed up with his whole drum kit crammed in the back of a cyan Fiat 127 he borrowed from his uncle. 

My cousin plays the drums, said Massimiliano with a here’s-the-solution kind of face, when I revealed to him that we badly needed a drummer. And as if Francesco wasn’t expecting anything else, the next day we did have a drummer. I jumped at this opportunity, he confessed to me months later during a smoke break from playing, it's way easier to make it big here. Now, “here” was my birthplace -- a little town in Central Italy, probably just a few thousand souls larger than his countryside village. The “opportunity” was our teenage band -- i.e., nothing. But everything’s relative, I learned right there. And to him this looked like a relatively big deal. It was the early eighties.

We gathered twice a week, but sometimes he did all that driving only to find out that playing was canceled due to some unexpected circumstance. And of course cellphones hadn’t been invented yet. I can give you a call when something comes up, I said to him. Except they had no telephone, so he gave me the number of someone living next door. Call this number, he instructed, and ask to speak with Francesco, Maria’s son. 

And sure enough, a few days later, something came up. So I called, and followed the instructions to the letter. All I heard from the other end was the noise of the receiver being annoyingly slammed on a hard surface, a few steps, a window opening, and a voice yelling ‘Francescooo’. After some silence that felt like eternity, I heard the steps of someone hurrying up the stairs, getting to the receiver, and grabbing it as if triumphantly winning an Olympic game. Francesco’s voice, short of breath, uttered a Hello that craved for an easier life. 

It was mid November, and overcast. A light rain started to drizzle when Francesco’s car pulled up for the first time in front of the entrance of our rehearsal place. All I knew about him, I got from Massimiliano. He’s good, he said. Nothing else. We helped him unload the car and, after some introductory small talk over half a cigarette, enough to appreciate he wasn’t the talkative type, he started setting up the drum kit. This will take me a while, he said, you guys just play. It did take him a while, and we jammed some garbage with no logic or order in the meantime. Once done, he entered our music like thunder. 

Francesco was indeed good, but loud. He banged on those drums with the force of a hurricane. Never missed a beat, always perfectly on time, his sound dominated whatever we played. And in our four-by-four square meters, that was a problem. Years later, I thought this was his way of offsetting a shy, quiet character. It’s weird how life evens things out.         

The apex for us came when we were selected to take part in a famous traveling contest for young, unknown bands, directed by Rita Pavone and Teddy Reno, two prominent figures in Italy’s music scene at the time. Looking back, I'm not even sure if we were actually selected or if it was something we simply signed up for. Yes, here's how it worked: any local band from the place the show stopped in could freely sign up. There was a first preliminary day where all the bands that signed up played before a jury, headed by Rita and Teddy. The few best ones were then selected to go on to the final soirée in front of a big audience, and even on TV. Winning the contest, or even getting to play in the finals on TV, and of course being endorsed by Rita Pavone, would be a life-changing opportunity.

But we played horribly and didn’t make the cut, and our lives didn’t get the opportunity to change. The highlight of the day was when Rita, once we were done playing, publicly asked Francesco a question. That fill, about three quarters of the song in, why did you do it? Francesco’s forehead showed a certain amount of perspiration, while his face turned white. But he kept his cool, surprisingly. Then, he used the drumsticks to scratch his back, and spoke some words. A number of words equal to, or greater than, all the words that I had heard him utter since we first met. They all flowed out, flying away as if escaping a prison, free at last. 

I did it to create an atmosphere, he said. There is a moment of tension at that point in the track, and I thought my fill would help the transition. What’s music, after all, if not an everlasting duality between tension and release? Rita Pavone kept quiet for a good thirty seconds, taking in what she had just heard. Then she thanked and dismissed us. It was mid April, the sky was a flawless blue, and the spring air slid smoothly over my skin like freshly ironed sheets. 

After that, Francesco returned to inhabiting his shy and quiet self pretty much until the last day I saw him. A couple of us were going off to college; hundreds of miles away, in my case. So the band broke up, and Francesco had nowhere to go but his countryside village, in a house with no telephone. When we finished loading his car with the drum kit, we took a few minutes to say goodbye and wish each other well. There, he said more words. In fact, the last words I ever heard from him.

Don’t be sad, he said, our little band is nothing compared to the kind of life you’ll be living from now on. In a great city, going to a great school. Off to who knows how great a career afterwards. I wish I had all this myself. Thank you for calling me that day. We tried to do something memorable, but you guys sucked before I joined and we continued to suck with me in the band. You know what, though? I wouldn’t swap the last three years of my life with anything else in the world. We hugged for a few seconds, and our lives split.

Someone said “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get”. A line that’s become famous and kind of trite over the years. But that line never quite resonated with me. In fact, I disagree: you do know what you’re going to get. You open the box and look at its content, pick the chocolates you like the best first, and leave those you don’t like behind. 

And I’ve always sensed that this version had some important underlying philosophical message, but I could never quite pin it down. Until I read Norwegian Wood by Murakami, and was flabbergasted at this same idea being narrated in one of the dialogues between Watanabe and Midori. With a slightly different twist. 

"You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. ‘Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be ok.' Life is a box of chocolates." 

Life is a continuous series of junctions where we have to make a choice. When the options we’re presented with look good, that’s easy: we pick the chocolate we like because there’s plenty left in the box. When we’re only presented with painful options, all we can do is pick a chocolate that we don’t like because that’s all there’s left in the box. But here’s the twist: you cannot just leave the ones you don’t like and throw the box away. A new box will come your way only once you’ve eaten all the chocolates in the prior one. And a new cycle will start. 

I never saw Francesco again, after that last day. We didn’t keep in touch. Sometimes, when I see a drum kit, I think about him. And wonder how many boxes of chocolates he got to finish so far.     

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